Jack said he had a job starting tomorrow at sunup, guiding some Boston business connection of LaRiviere’s, but then he planned to take Saturday and hunt for himself. All the client wanted was to kill something with horns — anything, Jack said, even a cow — but he would take him up to Parker Mountain, where they could use LaRiviere’s cabin as a base and where Jack figured he could find the old guy a deer and also track and mark a big buck off to go back and kill later for himself.
Wade knew the client, the way he knew everyone who spent much time in Lawford, even the summer people, which this man was. His name was Evan Twombley, some kind of Massachusetts union official or something, and he owned a fancy house out on Lake Agaway that he used maybe a month at the most in the summer and, since it was winterized, week-ends and holidays over the rest of the year. In recent years the place had been used more by Twombley’s daughter and her husband and kids than by Twombley himself, but Wade remembered the man nonetheless and believed he was rich and thought Jack was lucky to have the chance to work as a guide for him.
“Oh, I don’t know about lucky,” Jack said. “The guy’s a full-blown asshole. I’d just as soon be out there for myself tomorrow as work for some clown in a red suit who shoots at shadows with a gun he’s never used before. Pay’s good, though. Hundred dollars a day. I got to guarantee a kill, of course. Which I can do. There’s some monster bucks hiding out up there.”
“How’d you get the job?” Wade asked.
“LaRiviere,” Jack said. He inhaled, held his breath and passed the joint back and kept talking. “You know Gordon, he’s always got some kind of angle working,” he said. “Right now looks like he’s keeping Twombley happy, and I suppose I’m his boy.”
Hettie said, “Do you mind?” and reached forward, flipped the tape over and turned the volume up enough to make the men shout to one another to be heard. They had reached the Route 29 turnoff, and Jack tooled the truck down the ramp onto the narrow road to Lawford.
“You should get close to Twombley!” Wade yelled.
“How come?”
“The fucker’s loaded,” he said. “That’s why. If you want to get ahead, my boy, you got to learn to make a guy like that need you. Get irreplaceable.”
Jack laughed, flashing white teeth, and Hettie laughed too, and Wade watched her place her left hand on Jack’s thigh.
“Follow your example, eh?” Jack said.
“You bet. Look at LaRiviere,” he said. “The sonofabitch couldn’t get along without me.”
Jack laughed again. “Yeah, he’d go broke tomorrow if you quit him, right? And you, you’d be sitting in the catbird seat, right?”
“Right!” Wade said, and he grinned like a lizard, when he noticed in the side mirror next to him the glare from the high beams of a car coming up behind them fast.
Jack said, “Bastard’s got his lights on high.”
The driver hit his horn once sharply, and as the car passed them on the left, Wade looked over and recognized it — the silver Audi owned by Lillian’s husband.
“Shit,” he said.
“What?” Hettie said.
“My ex-wife. Lillian and her new husband,” he said. “That was them in the Audi that just passed us.”
Jack said, “Audi’s a good car.”
“Lillian?” Hettie said. “What’s she doing up here? Lillian, jeez, I haven’t seen her since — what? — years. Since I used to baby-sit Jill for you guys, remember?” she said, and she smiled warmly into Wade’s face.
“Yeah.”
“What’s she up for?” Jack asked.
“Aw, shit, she’s here to get Jill. Pain in the ass,” Wade said. “Me and Jill had a little argument. Listen, Jack, I got to get back, I got to get back to town. Move this thing, will you? See if you can get back to the town hall before they get there, okay?”
“Piece of fucking cake, man.” He hit the accelerator, and the truck leapt ahead, the exhausts suddenly roaring, like a steady high-pitched wind sweeping through pine trees.
Wade was jumpy again; the effect of the marijuana was instantly and wholly gone. He was inside his own time now, and running late, as usual. Staring over the flat hood of the truck at the curving narrow road ahead of it, he asked himself over and over, as if he had the answer lodged someplace in the back of his brain, why the hell the night had to work out like this. It could have been an ordinary and decent evening, just a divorced father spending time with his ten-year-old daughter. Not much to ask for. No big deal. Nothing complicated. Now the whole thing was a humiliating mess, and it was getting worse by the minute.
The silver Audi kept ahead of the truck all the way into town. At the blinking yellow caution light in front of the school, with the truck less than a hundred yards behind it, the car, without slowing down, lurched around the heap of smashed pumpkins. Jack plowed straight through, splashing chunks and halves of pumpkin like orange slush into the air and off to the sides of the road, but he could not catch the car on a straight stretch of road where he could pass, so that he was still trailing the Audi when it slowed suddenly at the Common and pulled in and double-parked in front of the town hall.
Jack braked the truck by dropping into lower gears, turned left off Route 29 and drew slowly, almost delicately, toward the Audi, just as the driver and the woman in the passenger’s seat got out. The woman, Lillian, wore a tailored lavender ankle-length down coat with a hood; her narrow angular face seemed aimed out of the hood like a weapon at the door of the town hall, where a large number of people, adults and children, were coming out.
The driver, Lillian’s husband, is named Bob Horner. He is a tall thin man with an extremely high forehead and strips of sandy hair that he combs carefully over the top of his head from a part just above his left ear. He wore that night a tan tweed shooting jacket, belted, with suede patches on the elbows and across the right shoulder and breast, and before he closed the car door, he reached inside and grabbed from the back a felt Tyrolean hat and put it on.
By this time Jack had drawn his truck up next to the Audi, hood to hood and towering over it, and Wade swung open the door and stepped down to the ground. “Lillian!” he called, and she wheeled around to face him, while her husband, caught standing next to Wade, stepped quickly back and away.
As if merely curious, Lillian asked, “Where’s Jill?” She smiled lightly.
Lillian, as usual, was playing a role in a scene, Wade decided. And its purpose was to manipulate him into playing opposite her. Though he was not fooled by the tactic, it was effective nonetheless. It was an old story: she was too fast for him. At least when it came to setting up their respective roles — controlling what he said to her and how he said it. He always realized a few seconds too late that their encounters were contests, games with high stakes, and that winning them had nothing to do with rightness or wrongness or even with will power — God knows, he had plenty of will power, everyone said so, even Lillian herself. No, it had to do with who could set the rules of the game first, which, as he always found out a little too late, came straight from the nature of the roles they played. If she was yellow, he had to be red; if her die was six, his was forced to be one.
He leaned forward and placed his hands flat on the trunk of the Audi, as if he were being frisked, and spread all ten fingers out and studied them for a second. “Me and Jill, we just had a little spat, Lillian,” he said. “That’s all. She felt kind of strange, I guess, and shy. From not knowing some of the kids or something. You know, from not knowing them like she used to, feeling like an outsider, I think. So she decided the best thing was to call you to come up here to bring her home. I didn’t know she called you. I don’t know what she said, but I … I tried to call you, to get you to forget it, you know? But you’d already left.”